Powerful Prayer

Today I was thinking about Prayer and how it leads to the blessing of the Lord.  The second half of James 5:16 (NIV) says “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” The question that came to me is “How do we make sure that our prayers are powerful and effective?”. So how do you know that God is answering our prayers even if the answers are not what we want to hear? The answer is the blessing equation. We can all have powerful and effective prayers, the formula for this is written out in the Bible Jesus in Matthew 17:20 (NIV) said, “He replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”.”



So, to have powerful prayers, we need faith the type of faith that does not have us praying for God to do something but the faith to pray a prayer of thanksgiving for what God is about to do.  Jesus tells us “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8 NIV).  Our Powerful prayer should be to ask God for what we want and then thank him for the blessing we are going to receive.  Sometimes we get caught up in praying for God to have his will in a matter in our life, but we forget that God is our Father and as a father, he cares about what we want also. It’s not wrong to ask for what we want; it is a mistake to demand something from God or to try to make deals with God. We should never say “God if you answer my prayer I will do something in exchange.”